Templates for Clothes, and "sample" PS files...

There's been a lot of people asking for templates for specific articles, or help with doing skins.

If anyone would be interested in me emailing them some PS files with examples/alphas (which can of course also be used in PSP) as templates for certain items, or would be interested in seeing the layer-y version of a skin, then email me (quickest way to contact me). If you want versions with a layer mask as well as the alpha, let me know in the email.

EDIT: DUE TO DEMAND THESE FILES ARE ONLINE FOR DOWNLOADING NOT BEING EMAILED NOW... LINK ON PAGE 3 OF THE THREAD

I know how useful it can be to try and "backward engineer" something rather than start from scratch.

There are certain conditions on this offer, however.

Clothes made using these templates cannot be sold for more than $50.
Skin samples are not for resale or redistribution in any form, AT ALL, however you are more than welcome to upload modified versions of the skin, so you can see how it looks on.

I realise there's an element of trust in those conditions... heheheh.

Equally, anyone requesting the files should be aware that I am absolutely NOT one of the elite designers in SL, which is why I'm not too bothered. However my business is ticking over and funding my alt's lavish lifestyle so they can't be that bad. But be warned: I am not a perfectionist by any stretch of the imagination!

It occurs to me as I write that some people might be interested in paying for custom templates with alphas/masks they can then custom texture and resell for as much as they liked-- if so drop me a line .

This is a great offer and will help a lot of people get started on making clothes and skins, including me. I use PSP and if the PS files would work on PSP that will be fantastic. I will e-mail you as suggested.

Tried to send you an e-mail but it said you did not wish to recieve e-mails so I will IM you in world, if I may.

Alexa

I'm thinking I might bundle a text file with the samples if people want it- with my top tips on it.

That sounds fantastic

Alexa

My email is jinny [at] squinny dot net. That should make life a bit easier

Sending email now.

There are also these by Chip Midnight which have no strings attached.

see this thread:

Chip's Thread with Templates

But Chip is not providing alpha channels. And Chip is not providing samples.

Which, is not a complaint, because Chip Midnight's clothing templates are amazing, and something that I greatly appreciate and use every single time I make clothing. I will be forever in Chip's debt for making those templates available.

But, the two things are apples and oranges. If Jinny is sending alpha channels and samples of avatar skins that's a different thing altogether, and I can't really fault her for her "strings." Her requests seem very reasonable to me.

It is vey nice of you to offer these to e1 and Please dont take this the wrong way because I do not want to come across as a whinner or greedy at all but... to have clothes priced way below "market' has the potental of major damage to the economy of SL.

I do realize that there are some designers that charge way to much for their clothes and skins but to the ones that price theirs decently you are definately making it very difficult for them to stay in business or even want to continue to make clothes.

There is another designer that only charges the upload cost and it is nice to let people buy fantastic clothes for low prices but to only charge 20 or 50L for a great outfit makes all of us "low cost" designers who pay huge rents for our store spots wonder if its worth even continueing. My clothes run 100 to 200L and find that is pretty much the going prices in SL as well as reasonable. Except for a very few who are extremely high and i guess that you can look upon it like discount stores vs Norstums or Macys LOL.

There are many facets to a beautiful Gem and so with that in mind.... e1 has the right to make what they want and price how they want it but was just hopeing you think about the way it might affect the masses of people (other designers) who share SL with you in another way.

Thanks so much for listening and again hope you understand what i am saying and not take this as a bashing to you cause not meant to be that in any way.

Thanks for the very kind words Jinny. And this is very cool of you to do. I'm sure lotsa people will find it hugely helpful

Zazas

I think it depends on what you are going to do with the information Jinny is kindly providing. Personally, I would like to make my own clothes - 90 percent of those in stores I would not wear. I am somewhat older than a lot of people in SL and have no desire to wear something with most of my flesh showing. Obviously that's what the majority of females want in here but I don't.

As to the stipulation on price should one wish to sell, it seems to me that a large number of shirts, for example, are priced at 50L, so no problem there.

I just hope I can translate it from Photoshop to PSP and make it work.

Alexa

Zazaz

I DO agree with your thoughts.....but there are MANY ways of looking at this situation..taking the original offer out of the picture for a while....

Supply-Demand

The more people join SL the more ppl will start business and clothes is already a saturated market as I am sure your aware.

I wsnt here in the beta days and am no 'old timer' but I imagine when there was less players then there was less stores....less clothes...less competition etc

Designers could ask for what they wanted.

a TYPICAL example of this is There.coms real estate crash.
*for those who arent in the know*
When There.com 1st opened it had no more than 250 houses available. Originaly designed FREE for players to rent direct from There.com.

The lucky few who got the houses free decided they had a RARE thing ( and indeed they did) so some-one latched onto tthe idea that they could auction the 'rights' to rent the house after they left. (they did this by agreeing to meet and going to private IMs and the current renter released the deeds for the new renter to quickly snatch them up..after a while There changed the deeds to let ppl auction them) ..House renters were selling 'the rights' *NOT THE HOUSE!* just the rights to be the next renter for LARGE VAST amounts of money i'm talking hundereds of pounds...and the rights to rent a fun zone for thousands...

This remained so for a good while...the price bobbed up & down but remained stable.

Then There.com released another 250 houses making a total of 500.
And despite the players insistance that prices would hold blah blah blah...they crashed...There suddenly had more houses than were desired.

And some people lost money BIG TIME..just from buying the deeds....never mind the monthly rent!

I played the real estate market in There.com just before it crashed.
I went back to There to tie up some loose ends and was browsing through the auctions...I saw a house in auction...that had 'rent me' button... ( means I didnt have to pay the current renter their asking price to release it as they hadnt paid the rent ontime and it had become available) I thought id hit the jackpot and rented it there & then for 25K ( £12) and put it up in auction immediatly!

It was THEN i saw that in actual fact there was about 50 houses all free and ready to rent...no one was in them..the real estate market had crashed in my absense.

So...going back to Sl...supply & demand.

More & more people are creating stores & clothes and items...take away the skill level what else can they do to 'win a sale' other than make the price attractive?

Its the way of the world...virtual or other wise..

You have to charge more to cover your massive TH prime location land fees for teh cost of high exposure..
But if some-one with the same amount of skill as yourself doesnt have the same overheads..why would they need to charge your prices?

Its all relative...and there aint a damb thing you me or anyone can do about it...

Only RARE and hard to obtain items can demand high price tags..theres far too much choice & skill were clothes are concerned to expect people to pay top price now i suspect.
People are quickly seeing you CAN get good stuff for 50L$ and anyway...all that means is they may buy MORE clothes?

Depends how you look at it...I paid 350L$ for a seburu outfit because for the 1st time i saw REAL talent in that outfit and detail..and felt it was worth that...but since then Ive seen just as much talent for FAR less...one example is 'Goth As f**k* chap *cant recall his name* at Transalvania...he has fab clothing...detailed...designed with originality...but he charges about 50L$ for a top and 75L$ for pants...and i will ALWAYS return to him now...as you get both...the quality AND the price.

Times are a changing...nothing stays 'exact' in a growing economy

Yes Alexa I do understand your plight, I am somewhat older also but make clothes that the masses wear and also agree that it does depend on what people will do with it but as i stated in my earlier post there is someone in game selling complete outfits and i mean not just tops for 20L and it does harm others who are trying to do it as a business venture. I am all for anyone doing as they wish i was merely sheding another light on the 50L stipulation that was stated

And it is most kind of Jenny to offer the help and templetes to people, I for one would love to have them but cant abide by the 50L stipulation although as I stated my clothes are usually 100 to 150L, I have 1 outfit of 200L only because of all the work it took to make. I am not priceing them to get rich but since I am pretty new and to PS which fights me LOL I have more than just 50L in upload costs and because I usually have at least 4 items per outfit.

But again i am not saying anyone has to do or sell what anyone else wants or for what price. And if i have upset anyone by my replys I am truly sorry, Thanks

LillyBeth Loved your reply and I agree totally!! You are so right and thanks for making what one of the things I was trying to get across clearer. But I guess my main thing is I can't share in getting the templetes and help cause I can't sell my outfits for 50L and still pay my rent ... sigh... oh well I will continue fighting with PS and may the strongest of us survive LOL

Zazas, not to derail the thread (and Jinny's magnanimous offer) but this is an important point -- possibly even one that should have its own thread in this section.

The only two choices we have are: (a) Price fixing, which rarely works anyway; (b) offer better quality/value than the undercutters.

I have a hard time believing that anyone who puts serious effort into a new design, complete with detailed, original textures, would just fob their product off on the market for $20L. I've sold T-shirts for $20L but they take me about 5 minutes to build a transparent logo or slogan and slap it on a shirt. Anyone with a graphics program could do that much.

For the items with embroidery, lace hems, satin textures, prim add-ons, etc., I can't believe someone selling this stuff for $20L would stay in business long. One, they're getting peanuts for their own time invested and two, the (financial) reward is not going to inspire them much.

My plan is still to put together a range of items, priced appropriately. I'm going to focus more on giving the customer options and explaining what they're getting before they buy it than I am in cranking out mass quantities of shoddy gear. I still believe there's a market for quality and customer service, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Hi Cindy, well believe me the outfits I discribe by the person selling them for 20L are very good and from what I believe is a Grafics artist. I will not name the person here but will contact you in game and send you a LM to her place so you can see for yourself that these outfits are well under priced which of course is her perogitive.

Oh and I dont want to derail the thread anymore then I have so hopefully this will be my last reply.. If any one else wants to they can contact me in game.

First of all: I've had quite a few responses so what I'm going to do is assemble an email with some attachments and send them to everyone at once.

The problem I could face here is ATTACHMENT SIZE limits, if you know your email service has a small attachment limit then RE-EMAIL me again, I'm thinking about just making the files available as a big zip file on the web for download. (password protected, heheh) If I do I'll email the link to everyone who has emailed me so far (and there was a lot, phew!!)

As for the ethics of my offer:

The reason I put the $50 stipulation on there is that I really don't want people making huge amounts of money with my stuff, because I think the price of stuff in SL should reflect the RL time & skill that went into making it, regardless of overheads, etc. If you're making something from a template, this will of course take less time and skill than it does to do something unique from scratch, and so the end result should cost less.

Making clothes for SL is fun, and I'd like to see as many people as possible having that fun. Most of the people who have emailed me are complete beginners. I came to SL with a functional knowledge of PSP, from doing small scale web design, and it was painful enough for me.

I hope no-one can blame me for offering people something that I would have crawled over broken glass for when I was first starting out...

Jinny, I am by no means a great designer, but I have been making clothes since I started SL, and I came like you, with a "functional knowledge of PSP from doing small scale web design" ... and you're right, it is painful even from that starting point.

I can find absolutely no fault with what you are doing here. I think it is very generous of you, very kind of you, indeed. I also think that your stipulations for the use of your resources are extremely reasonable. I applaud you for your willingness to help newer designers.

Jinny

You are putting an enormous amount of work in this and offering us something unique. As I explained, I want to make clothes for myself. I don't think your stipulation is too onerous, considering what you will be providing.

I look forward to hearing from you

Alexa

Okay chaps, here's the latest news...

I'm going through the files I'm going to share, to make them suitable, and I definitely think it's going to be too much for most mail services in terms of attachment size if I send them all at once, so what I shall do is make them available for people to download from the web.

I shall email the address and password to people who have requested the templates.

So far, I've included a selection of skin-related examples, a simple bikini template, and a Top and Somewhat Vague Tips text file.

Are there any other specific requests?

I should have everything ready to go some time today.

TOP TIP: Download "Tattoo" (link can be found in this forum somewhere) and get the 3D avatar template (ditto) and then you can look at your clothes in 3D before uploading them.

That should save you a fair old wallop of cash

the emails containing the links to the file have been sent.

if there's any probs.... email me

I would love to get a copy of what you have, I am not a designer I just want to make my own custom skin. thanks for the great offer!

Jinny,

How do you get your clothing into the Tatto so you can look at it on the 3D avatar?

Save your items as the UPPERBODY, LOWERBODY or HEAD png files found in the same directory as the avatar template.

Trifen: email me your addres... jinny at squinny dot net